How big are the Ranchos?

The Gardnerville Ranchos has slipped to No. 7 on the list of retirement hotspots in Nevada.

Released by a business news Web site called portfolio.com, the ranking is based on the same formulas used by its sister site, bizjournals.com back in 2007.

When we reported the ranking two years ago, the Ranchos was No. 1 in the country based on the senior population's increase between 2000 and 2005, which was nine times the annual growth rate.

The item lists the population of the Ranchos at 45,180, which while less than the 47,000 in 2005, is still four times the community's actual population.

It actually coincides with the Census population for Douglas County in 2008.

So as far as Portfolio.com is concerned, we're all Ranchos residents.

By the way, the No. 1 retirement hotspot is Pahrump.

We had a veritable reunion of The Record-Courier staff circa 1994 at the Minden McDonalds on Friday the 13th. There was the editor (not me), the people editor, the photographer, the intern and the columnist, oh, and the news editor (me).

The occasion was a brief visit by Valley native Sadie Jo Smokey back home with her two children.

Attending were Sheila Gardner, R-C people editor emeritus and retired Nevada Magazine publisher Joyce Hollister, former R-C photographer Belinda Grant and husband Jim, former R-C columnist and staff writer Linda Hiller, and myself. The star was Sadie Jo's baby, Sadie Angelina Smokey, but we had a great time talking about what mama's doing these days.

Sadie Jo is the Phoenix reporter for the Arizona Republic, one of the biggest newspapers in the West.

She got her start while she was at Douglas High School as an intern for Joyce in 1994. She wrote Pages From the Past for two years before she started college.